Library:The Face of Imperialism

The Face of Imperialism
Author	Michael Parenti
First published	2011

The Face of Imperialism is a book written by Statesian academicMichael Parenti, published in 2011 by Paradigm Publishers.

1 - Thinking About Empire

IN THIS AGE OF EMPIRE, how do we arrive at the truth? Many of our political perceptions are shaped by culturally prefigured templates implanted in our minds without our conscious awareness. To become critically aware of these ingrained opinions and images is not only an act of self-education; it is an act of self-defence. This seems especially true when dealing with matters of global impact, such as the nature of empire.

Orthodoxy as "Objectivity"

In 1932, Carl Becker was among the first to give currency to the phrase the climate of opinion. Becker argued that ideas and notions about reality do not spring forth from the mind in a social vacuum. They are pursued because they seem to fit into the ongoing climate of opinion.[1] They reinforce each other, gaining acceptance through circulation and repetition. The notions that fit into the prevailing climate of opinion are more likely to be accepted as objective, while those that clash with it are usually seen as beyond the pale and lacking in credibility. So, more often than we realise, we accept or decline an idea, depending on its acceptability within the ongoing opinion climate.

In other words, the mental selectors we use to organise our perceptions are not mostly of our own creation. Much about our personal perception is not all that personal; rather, it is shaped by a variety of forces and conditions outside ourselves, such as the dominant ideology (or "dominant paradigm"), the conventional social values, one's position in the social structure, the available flow of information and disinformation, and the potential benefits and losses attached to the perceptions and pronouncements one makes. On that last point it is obbligato to reference Upton Sinclair's remark: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."[2]

If what we call "objectivity" is really little more than a conformity of mainstream bias, then isn't one paradigm about as reliable—or unreliable—as another? Is all truth, then, nothing more than opinion and belief? If not, what makes a heterodox analysis better than an orthodox one?

First, radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. They do not get to float freely down the mainstream. They cannot rest on the orthodox power to foreclose dissent, and they are not supported by the unanimity of bias that passes for objectivity.

Second, we can value an opinion by the function(s) it serves. The heterodox view has a special task: to contest the prevailing orthodoxy, to broaden the boundaries of debate, to wake people up, to unearth suppressed data. The function of orthodox or conventional opinion is just the opposite: to keep the parameters of discourse as narrow as possible, to dismiss evidence that ill fits the dominant paradigm. Hence, all opinions are not of the same value. It depends on what they are being used for, what interests they serve.

We have all observed that if something does not fit what people believe, they marshal their reserve defences. Rarely when faced with contrary evidence do they discard their preciously held beliefs. And if they cannot challenge the validity of what confronts them, they have fallback positions that explain to their satisfaction the data that do not fit the pictures in their heads.

When the orthodox view becomes so entrenched, evidence becomes irrelevant.

Broaching certain subjects casts doubt on the credibility and sanity of the dissident who dares to raise a question. Consider such inflammatory topics as: the legitimacy of the 2004 presidential election in the United States, the Shangri-La image of Tibet before the Chinese invasion, the findings of the Warren Commission regarding the assassination of President John Kennedy, the number of people killed by this or that tyrant, the Clinton/NATO/CIA war against Yugoslavia, the unanswered questions of the 9/11 Commission, a class power analysis of the American political system, and the absence of politico-economic content in public policy debates.

Such topics raise issues that cross the boundary of allowable opinion. They move into forbidden terrain and are therefore dismissed out of hand, denied the opportunity for rational discourse. Through a process of immediate assertion and intensive repetition, the universe of discourse is preempted and monopolised. This is one way the dominant paradigm is maintained. One crosses the lines beyond permissible opinion only at a risk to one's intellectual reputation or even one's career.

The Myth of Innocent Empires

The presence of self-legitimating ideological boundaries is evident in the discussion about empire. When writing a book about ancient Rome, I discovered that much of the historic literature on empire is rather favourable.[3] Empires have been hailed as grand accomplishments, bringing stability and peace where before there had been only squabbling tribes. We even give empires laudatory peace names, such as Pax Romana and Pax Britannica.

Empires also are sometimes seen as innocent unintentional accretions that arise stochastically—that is, by chance, without benefit of any kind of "conspiratorial" planning or even consistent causality. Years ago we used to hear that the British Empire was put together in a "fit of absentmindedness." More recently, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, and referring to that event, The Economist, a conservative British publication, wrote, "Empires are born in funny ways, and sometimes via the law of unintended consequences by accident."[4]

In fact, empires are not innocent, absent-minded, accidental accretions. They are given purposive direction by rulers who consciously mobilise vast amounts of personnel and materials in order to plunder other lands and peoples. The British, for instance, did not just happen to find themselves in India. They pushed their way in with all deliberate force and rapacious intent. The Americans did not just mistakenly stumble into Iraq because of some misinformation that the Iraqis were linked to Al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction. The White House coterie that pursued war had been calling for intervention against Iraq for at least a year before the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and well before there was ever any thought of Al Qaeda terrorist networks in Baghdad or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.[5]

Despite the sympathetic treatment accorded empires by numerous historians and others, the term empire was not comfortably applied to the United States during most of the twentieth century, at least not by us Americans. Other countries had colonies, but America had "territories" and "possessions"—so I was taught in grade school. The word empire remained suspect, an unbecoming appellation that besmirched our shining republic.

No wonder that when I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, some of my American compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that US rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defence or for humanitarian rescue operations or to restore order in a troubled region or overthrow tyranny and propagate democracy. But some few years later, oddly enough everyone started talking about the United States as an empire and writing books with titles like The Sorrows of Empire, The Folly of Empire, Twilight of Empire, Empire of Illusion—all referring to the United States.

One professor, writing in Harvard Magazine, was unequivocal about his country's force majeure role in the world: "We are militarily dominant around the world. [...] A political unit that has overwhelming superiority of military power, and uses that power to influence the behaviour of other states is called an empire. [...] [O]ur goal is not combatting a rival but maintaining imperial order."[6]

One also could hear right-wing pundits announcing on television that we are an empire, with all the responsibilities and opportunities of empire, and as the strongest nation in the world we have every right to act as such—as if having the power gives US leaders an inherent entitlement to exercise it upon others as they see fit. So liberals and conservatives began to lay claim to the notion of empire and treat it as worthy of public embrace.

"What is going on here?" I asked myself at the time. How is it that after years of denial and denunciation, many individuals now feel free to talk about empire when they mean American empire? The answer, I realised, is that the word has been divested of its full meaning. "Empire" seems to mean simply dominion and power, most notably military power. Thus Chalmers Johnson tells us that the United States has an empire of bases rather than colonies. He sees a US government that is "obsessed" with maintaining military dominance over the entire world. The 730 or more US military bases that ring the globe, he claims, are proof that the "United States prefers to deal with other nations through the use or threat of force rather than negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction." (In fact, the United States constantly uses negotiations, commerce, or cultural interaction along with a whole arsenal of other modes of influence.) The rise of American militarism, Johnson goes on to say, is accompanied by layers of bureaucracy and secrecy designed to circumvent public scrutiny and keep power in the hands of the Pentagon.[7]

What is missing from these kinds of analyses and even more so from the public discourse in general is the politico-economic content of empire. In other words, while we hear a lot about empire and militarism, we hear very little about imperialism. This is strange, for imperialism is what empires do. Imperialism is the very activity of empire. (Another name for empire is imperium.)

By imperialism I do not mean just power and dominion; I mean the process of transnational investment and capital accumulation. Nor would I pretend to be the only investigator who thinks of imperialism that way. There are a number of advanced scholars—such as James Petras, Eva Golinger, Gregory Elich, Gerald Horne, Henry Veltmeyer, Francis Shor, and David Harvey—who offer a more developed and accurate view of the forces of imperialism.[8]

For latter-day liberal converts like Chalmers Johnson, however, the word imperialism is used in the same empty way as is the word empire: to denote dominion and control with little attention given to the powerful economic interests that operate as a motor force behind US policy. Johnson and a host of others have produced shallow critiques of empire, characterising US interventionist policies as "reckless," "misguided," "inept," "bumbling," "insensitive," "overreaching," "self-deceptive," "deluded," "driven by false assumptions," and "presuming a mandate from God," while ladened with "tragic mistakes" and "imperial hubris."[9] They see all this as a mindless proclivity embedded in the American psyche or culture. We are left to conclude that US leaders are chronically deluded, stupid, and incapable of learning from past experience; they lack the splendid intelligence of their liberal critics. For the critics, empire has little to do with economic class interests and is mostly a product of an aggrandising national temperament incited by myopic overweening leaders.

Not Just "Power for Power's Sake"

In this book, imperialism is defined as follows: the process whereby the dominant investors in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labour, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country. In short, empires do not just pursue power for power's sake. There are real material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over. Behind Colonel Blimp there stood the East India Company and the Bank of England. Behind Teddy Roosevelt and US Marines there stood the United Fruit Company and Wall Street. The intervention is intended to enrich the investors and keep the world safe for them.

For centuries the ruling interests in Western Europe and, later on, North America and Japan laid claim to most of planet Earth, including the labour of indigenous peoples (as workers or slaves), their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), their markets, and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, slaves, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, fruits, tobacco, palm oil, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently, uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil, and—say it again—oil, and numerous other things.[10]

Empires are enormously profitable for the investor interests of the imperial nation but enormously costly to the people of the colonised country. Even today, plundered populations bemoan the resource curse, knowing from bitter experience that countries rich in natural resources usually end up as losers. Many of the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are rich, only the people are poor. The imperialists search out rich places, not barren ones, to plunder.

"Arid Spain and Portugal siphoned off South America's gold; tiny Holland dominated vast Indonesia. Britain, barren except for coal, built an imperial swap shop of grain, lumber, cotton, tea, tobacco, opium, gems, silver, and slaves. Japan, less than a century out of its bamboo-armour era, conquered much of China for its iron and coal. The postcolonial era [1950 to today] hasn't been any easier on the resource-rich have-nots."[11]

In addition to the pillage of their lands, the people of these targeted countries are frequently killed in large numbers by the intruders. This is another thing that empires do which too often goes unmentioned in the historical and political literature of countries like the United States, Britain, and France. Empires impoverish whole populations and slaughter huge numbers of innocent people. Along with those who are killed outright, the victims should include the many shattered survivors whose lives are reduced to a miserable subsistence or a grieving and painful undoing.[12]

The purpose of the imperial killings is to prevent alternative, independent, self-defining nations from emerging—nations that might threaten the imperium's hegemonic control, thereby jeopardising its political-economic advantages. Just to give one example of the imperium's carnage, during the Vietnam War about a million and a half Vietnamese were killed: 185,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 924,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers, and 415,000 additional civilians. About 58,00 American troops also perished.[13] The great majority of these killings were perpetrated by US military forces with their vastly superior fire power.

Regarding imperialism's capacity to deliver death and destruction, consider the case of Iraq. In 1991, twelve years before Iraq was invaded and occupied by President George W. Bush, his father, President George H. W. Bush, launched an aerial war (the Gulf War) against that same nation. At that time, Iraq's standard of living was the highest in the Middle East. Iraqis enjoyed free medical care and free education. Literacy had reached about 80 percent. University students of both genders received scholarships to study at home and abroad. Most of the economy was state owned. Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein was pressing for a larger portion of the international oil market. In the eyes of the Western imperialists, Saddam was charting an independent course and was guilty of committing economic nationalism. He would have to be taught a lesson. His country needed to be bombed back into the Third World from which it was emerging.

In the six weeks of aerial attacks in 1991, US planes (with minor assistance from other NATO powers) destroyed more than 90 percent of Iraq's electrical capacity, and much of its telecommunication systems including television and radio stations, along with its flood control, irrigation, sewage treatment, water purification, and hydroelectric systems. Domestic herds and poultry farms suffered heavy losses. US planes burnt grain fields with incendiary bombs and hit hundreds of schools, hospitals, rail stations, bus stations, air raid shelters, mosques, and historic sites. Factories that produced textiles, cement, petrochemicals, and phosphate were hit repeatedly. So were the refineries, pipelines, and storage tanks of Iraq's oil industry. Some 200,000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers were killed in those six weeks. Nearly all the aerial attackers employed laser-guided depleted-uranium missiles, leaving hundreds of tons of radioactive matter spread over much of the country, leading to tens of thousands of more deaths in the following years, including many from what normally would be treatable and curable illnesses.[14] Twelve years later, Bush Jr. invaded Iraq and wreaked further death and destruction upon that country (see Chapter 9).

So the face of imperialism reveals endless carnage. This should be kept in mind when using such neutral terms as foreign policy, international relations, overseas commitments, régime change, and intervention.

Instrumental "Truths" and the Dominant Paradigm

The imperialists are among the socio-economic and political elites who are the keepers of the dominant paradigm. The dominant paradigm is the prevailing ideology or mode of thought that purports to explain how and why society functions as it does. The purveyors of the dominant paradigm in the United States and the western world in general most certainly believe in it. The ideology they propagate defines their world for them. It is the magic alchemy that lends virtue to their class supremacy, assuring them of their indispensable worth to society. The dominant paradigm tells them that all their wrongfully acquired gains and privileges are rightfully theirs.

Along with one of their eighteenth-century progenitors, Alexander Hamilton, the corporate economic elites believe that the country should be run by "the rich and the wellborn." They deeply feel they are deserving of their station in life. They believe the United States should lead the world and they should lead the United States. They are convinced that the poor are the authors of their own poverty, and that the working class consists of a troublesome lot who need to be reined in along with the middle class—both of whom are admonished to ratchet down their standard of living so that those at the very top can get an ever larger portion of the pie and an ever firmer grip on the servings.

Do those who put forth the lies of empire believe what they tell us? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That an opinion buttresses one's self-interest does not necessarily mean it is hypocritically embraced. If anything, it is all the more fervently held and is believed to be correct by the very fact that it serves one's advantages so well. Do the empire builders believe the propaganda they put out in support of specific policies? To be sure, sometimes they deliberately fabricate, as when you catch them in blatant inconsistencies. Much of the time truth is not even given consideration. It is much like the advertising world: the prime concern when selling a product is not "is it true?" but "will it sell?" Is the message effective? Is it getting across? If so, then it is "true" so to speak, and we can go with it. If not, then it is discarded. The approach to truth is purely instrumental.

Take the propaganda line that President George W. Bush used for almost a year in regard to Iraq: stay the course. Eventually the administration ascertained that the public did not like the idea of indefinitely staying the course in Iraq. It made them feel as if there was no hope for a change in policy, no hope for ending the war. Hence, sometime in early 2007 the White House stopped using that phrase not because they no longer believed it (assuming they ever did) but because it was not serving their propaganda goal, their big sell.

Do those who preside over the US empire believe in their own virtue? All people, parties, and national leaders believe in their own virtue. But even more so, more than anything else in the world, with the utmost dedication and ferocity, they believe in protecting and advancing their own material interests. And, as we shall see, they do whatever it takes to do so.

2 - The Omnipresent Arsenal

LIKE EMPIRES BEFORE IT, the American imperium needs to muster immense quantities of military might. An empire finds its birth, growth, and perhaps even its eventual death in its force majeure, its irresistible armed power. Born of its own aggrandisement, an empire lives in a world of real or imagined enemies who must be subdued with force and violence.

An Expensive Parasite

The imperial nation conceives of only two kinds of nations beyond its boundaries: satellites (or vassal states) and enemies (potential and actual). Among the satellites can be included "allies," those of lesser powers that remain friendly by staying more or less in line with the imperial transnational investment policies of large-scale capital accumulation. The satellite is a vassal state bonded to the imperium. Among the enemies (or "potential" enemies) is any country that seeks to chart an independent and self-defining course, to use its land, natural resources, capital, labour, and markets for its own development and possibly for regional hegemony.

Each new imperial acquisition creates a broadened perimeter, yet another area to defend against some real or imagined adversary. The empire builders know no rest. They require ever larger budgets and ever more elaborate weaponry. The corporate investors batten on defence contracts, leaving the taxpayer to bear the crushing costs.

In 2009, the Obama administration proposed a "stimulus package" to counteract the deep recession that afflicted the corporate economy. The package consisted of $787 billion in spending programmes presumably designed to create jobs and stimulate growth. (Although one critic noted that the stimulus plan was "overloaded with business-friendly tax cuts and too short on labour-intensive projects to put people to work right away."[1]) Left unmentioned in the debate over the package is that the US corporate economy has been living off annual stimulus packages ever since World War II. They are called "defence expenditures." Every year the military spending package is by far the largest item in the discretionary federal budget.

As to be expected, these colossal allocations are encouraged by corporate America, first, because such expenditures create a military might that boosts corporate global hegemony; and second, because military contracts are risk-free, set without competitive bidding or adequate oversight. They come with guaranteed cost overruns and bring in superlative profits. Defence spending does not have to struggle with sluggish consumer demand; there are always more advanced weapons to develop, obsolete weaponry to replace, soldiers to feed and shelter, and new wars to be fought.

These, then, comprise the two basic reasons why the US assiduously remains an armed superpower even in the absence of a comparable opponent. First, keeping the world safe for global capital accumulation requires a massive military establishment. Second, a massive military itself constitutes a source of immense capital accumulation.

The centrists and liberals dare not challenge these military appropriations for fear of being seen as faltering in their devotion to "keep America strong." Obama's 2009 stimulus package was heavily contested because it was for civilian economic purposes rather than for empire and war—in contrast to the huge 2010 defence spending bills that Congress passed with relatively little debate.

The enormous national debt the United States carries, and the heavy tax burden the public bears in servicing that debt, is largely an outgrowth of the gargantuan sums expended on wars and military budgets, the cumulative multi-trillion-dollar expense of maintaining a growing global empire for the past sixty years or more.

Some reactionaries argue that the debt is caused mostly by Social Security payments and other entitlements, all of which threaten to go broke in some years ahead. In fact, over the past half century or more the Social Security Trust Fund has been self-sufficient, taking in more money than it spends. By 2010 it contained an accumulated $2.6 trillion surplus.[2]

Cui Bono?

Numbering among the victims of imperialism are the common people of the imperial nation itself, those who pay the costs of empire with their blood and taxes. The empire feeds off the republic. The populace does without essentials so that the patricians can pursue their far-off plunder. The centre is bled so that the perimeter can continue to expand.

By 2011 the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had cost over 5,000 American lives, along with tens of thousands more wounded or disabled, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani deaths. Suicide rates among US veterans from these two wars remained dramatically higher than in the rest of the US population. Mental health breakdowns were now the leading cause of hospital admissions for the military, higher than physical injuries. On any given night, tens of thousands of homeless veterans were living on our nation's streets.[3]

As we moved deeper into the "Great Recession," almost every state and municipality in the United States was facing a budget crisis with serious shortfalls in revenues, record debts, and harsh cutbacks in human services. But one component of government, the Defense Department, suffered no shortage of funding. In 2010, the Pentagon and related agencies expended somewhere between $850 billion to $1 trillion, if we count the indirect costs of war and empire, such as veterans benefits and medical costs, annual debt payments due to military spending, covert military and intelligence operations, the 70 percent of federal research and development funds that goes to the military, "supplementary appropriations" for specific wars as in Iraq and Afghanistan, and defence expenses picked up by non-military agencies including "defence-related activities" of the General Services Administration, along with the Energy Department's nuclear weapons programmes, which consumes more than half of that department's budget.[4] This was a vastly larger sum than what all fifty states of the union together spent on education, housing, police, fire fighting, roads, hospitals, human services, occupational safety, and the like.

With only 5 percent of the world's population, the United States now accounts for almost 50 percent of the world's military spending. In second place is China, with 6.6 percent of the world's expenditure on arms. In the past decade the US allocated over $6 trillion on war and preparation for war.[5] Forty percent of the US military budget goes for overhead. One critic notes that the Pentagon cannot account for much of its funds, property, and supplies. "[I]t cooks its own books to make them appear in balance, and it makes new spending decisions based on the phony data." Many years of reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon's own inspector general testify to this.[6]

Along with immensely profitable war contracts comes increased income inequality and the defunding of public services. The impoverishment of public services is not only one of the costs of empire; it is one of the goals. The imperial rulers wage war not only against people in foreign lands but against their own populace as well, diminishing their demands, expectations, and sense of entitlement.

There are those who say that empires are "economically irrational" affairs because they cost more than they bring in. The British spent more in India than they were able to extract, and they extracted quite a bit. So too with the Americans in the Philippines and in Central America. But the people who pay the costs of empire are not the same as those who reap its rewards. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out in 1904, the gains of empire flow into the hands of the privileged business class, the large overseas investors, while the costs are extracted from the general treasury, that is, from "the industry of the rest of the people."[7] The same has been true in regard to Iraq: US taxpayers have carried the costs and are paying the debt that the war brought, while Halliburton, Blackwater, and a hundred other corporations reap the fat no-bid contracts and corrupt dealings, almost all of it not audited.[8]

Global Military Dominance

If US policy is respectful of other peoples' sovereignty and needs, then we might wonder why US leaders find it necessary to engage in a relentless push for global military domination. Since the 1990s they have been guided by various versions of a policy plan put together by Dick Cheney (soon to become U.S. vice-president) with Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, who respectively became secretaries of Defense and State. The agenda was for the United States to exercise unilateral rule over the world. As one writer put it:

"[The plan] calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful."[9]

The United States presides over an armed planetary force of a magnitude never before seen in human history. As listed by the Department of Defense, this force includes over a half-million troops stationed at over 700 military bases around the planet and many more within the fifty states, including numerous secret ones that go uncounted, along with unusually large bases recently constructed in Central Asia, Iraq, Colombia, and Kosovo.[10] In 2009 a democratically elected progressive government in Ecuador closed down the last US military base on its soil, claiming it was a violation of that country's sovereignty. Both Ecuador and Bolivia now have a ban on foreign bases written into their constitutions.

The US global war machines boasts an arsenal of over 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads[11] and 22,000 tactical ones, along with a naval strike force greater in total tonnage and firepower than all the other navies of the world combined, sailing every ocean and making port at every continent. Bomber squadrons and long-range missiles can deliver enough explosive force to cripple the infrastructures of entire countries anywhere on the globe. US rapid deployment forces have a firepower in conventional weaponry vastly superior to any other nation's force. Satellites and US spy planes conduct a surveillance that blankets the entire planet. Recent years brought a skyrocketing increase in military spending for the "war on terrorism."[12]

By 2011 the Obama administration was planning to deploy, on US soil, a new class of weapon capable of reaching any corner of the planet in less than an hour. The weapon will deliver a conventional warhead of enormous explosive force at pinpoint accuracy and phenomenally high speed, mimicking the destructive impact of a nuclear warhead and greatly diminishing America's reliance on its nuclear arsenal.[13]

The Pentagon has also developed an arsenal of space weaponry that runs the risk of sparking an arms race in outer space, including the unmanned X-37 space plane now circling Earth. The goal is to develop space vehicles that can hit terrestrial and outer space targets (including satellites) and send reconnaissance and attack drones back into the atmosphere.[14] By 2010 the Obama administration had stated its commitment to "equitable" arms control measures and "openness and transparency" among nations in conducting operations in outer space, while continuing a claim "to use space for national security activities."[15]

Despite the development of new weaponry, Washington showed no readiness to diminish its aging stockpile of tactical nuclear missiles in Europe. Requests by several NATO allies to cut back were rejected by the White House. As one reporter noted, "Many analysts consider these weapons a dangerous relic of the cold war, expensive to safeguard and deadly if they fell into the wrong hands."[16]

In the realm of conventional arms also, the United States has exercised an unmatched global reach, accounting for almost 70 percent of the world's conventional arms sales. Since World War II, Washington has given hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to train and equip the troops and internal security forces of more than eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend these nations from outside invasion but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic insurgency.

How do we know this? By observing that:

• With few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various régimes have ever been threatened by neighbouring countries.
• There is a great deal of evidences that US-supported military and security forces and death squads in many of these countries have been repeatedly used to destroy popular reformist movements and insurgencies within the countries themselves, ones that advocate egalitarian redistributive ("leftist") politics.
• Most "friendly" recipient régimes have supported the integration of their economies into a global system of corporate domination, opening themselves to foreign penetration on "free trade" terms singularly favourable to transnational investors.[17]

Note also the Pentagon's wide-ranging incursions into everyday life in America. The military exercises a censorial role in the making of Hollywood war films and cultivates connections with the World Wrestling Entertainment, NASCAR, Starbucks, and companies that deal with everything from iPods to Oakley sunglasses. The military is contractually involved in hundreds of scientific research projects, including such exotic and frightful undertakings as creating "cyborg insects" that can be remotely controlled and armed with bio-weapons. The Pentagon also is devising ways to socialise youngsters into having a receptive "culture of cool" response to the military by making friends on MySpace and other cyberspace connections and promotions.[18]

After the Red Menace

For decades we were told that a huge military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). The United States and other western capitalist nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 supposedly to serve as a bulwark against the threat of a Soviet invasion across Europe. Evidence of such a threat was never forthcoming.[19] Still, the "NATO shield" was put together, consisting of a massive build-up of military forces throughout Western Europe operating in effect under the hegemony of the United States.

But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist nations, Washington made no move to dismantle NATO. Instead of being abolished, NATO was expanded to include nations that reached across Eastern Europe right to Russia's border. In trying to convince us that we still needed NATO, policymakers and editorialists let fly a variety of arguments.

First, we heard that NATO is a relative bargain since the United States pays only 25 percent of its cost—as if this spoke to its purpose or political value.

Second, NATO can be used as a collective force for interventions without being stymied by a UN veto, as might happen when Washington seeks a United Nations mandate for war and invasion against some country. In other words, the United States has a freer hand operating through NATO than through the United Nations. Thus when the UN Security Council (because of Russian and Chinese vetoes) refused to cooperate with the destruction of Yugoslavia, Washington just enlisted NATO.[20]

Third, we are told by one mainstream newspaper that "NATO is committed to defending countries that share a commitment to democracy and free enterprise."[21]

Do we still need NATO? Actually the US public never needed NATO. The Soviet Red Army had neither the interest nor the capacity to invade Western Europe after World War II; State Department studies have admitted as much. Does that mean NATO has been senseless or useless? Not at all; it is a valuable tool to lock the Western European countries into the US imperial system, just as it is now doing to the newly capitalised Eastern European countries.

After the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European communist nations, all Cold War weapons programmes in the United States continued in production, with new ones being added all the time, including plans to conduct war from outer space. In short time the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies—for some unexplained reason previously overlooked—who posed a mortal threat to the United States, including "dangerous rogue states" like Libya with its menacing rag-tag army of 50,000.

The Newly Conjured Menace

Since the 1990s, a favourite villain conjured by US rulers to strike fear into the hearts of the American public has been the Islamic terrorist, who supposedly is part of a vast international network named Al Qaeda, headed by the diabolical Osama bin Laden, master of trained operatives in over forty countries. No hard evidence of such a wide-reaching coordinated terrorist foe has been found.[22] Usually left unmentioned is how the United States helped organise, finance, and mobilise the Islamic militants to fight a regressive war against revolutionary Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention into that country.[23]

To be sure, real terrorists do exist, a sparse scattering of poorly organised grouplets. They must be stopped before they can commit their wanton acts. But this gives no government—not even the one in Washington—license to bomb and destroy whole countries. Such massive military aggression delivers a much greater destruction than anything done by the jihadists and is destined to create rather than eliminate Islamic terrorists.

This seems to be the view held by Osama bin Laden and his followers, who see themselves involved in a defensive war against a merciless aggressor. They seem less impelled by some blind hatred and envy of America and more by a desire to get the American empire off their backs. They hate the empire because of the terrible things it does to them, their homelands, and their region of the world, bringing them exploitation, death, and destruction on a grand scale.[24]